


planes, trains & automobiles

by hotelbravo



Series: Becoming [2]
Category: Inception (2010), Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Crossover, Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-27
Updated: 2013-02-09
Packaged: 2017-11-27 01:37:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/656576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotelbravo/pseuds/hotelbravo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Or: How to get from A to B). Stiles takes to dreaming like a duck to water, but when all's said and done he probably would've been better off sticking with the wolves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story fleshes out the framework laid down in "parallel lines" - it's not necessary to read that before this one, but it'll help! :)

Stiles has been running for a long, long time.  
  
He's twenty-eight years old physically, and about fifty mentally, and that's before you count all the time spent wreaking havoc inside other people's heads while his body lay sleeping for scant minutes in the real world. His awkward edges have been smoothed out under Armani suits and Vacheron watches, he's died and woke up gasping more times than he can count and he's never, ever managed to shake the feeling that something terrible is about to happen.  
  
\----  
  
The first time he goes under is a premeditated accident.  
  
They’ve got the machine that gets them into each other’s heads, and there’s a drug that keeps them lucid, but nothing’s stable and the chemical cocktail makes them violently ill at least half the time. Professor Miles and his grad student, a broad-shouldered man by the name of Dominic-call-me-Dom Cobb, drink rocket-fuel coffee like it’s going out of style and have back-and-forth debates about architecture and dreamscapes where Stiles only understands every third word or so. Stiles’ job is mostly to collect the notes that they scatter everywhere, written on spare bits of notebook paper and old receipts, and try to assemble them into some kind of order.  
  
It’s premeditated in the sense that Stiles could feel the itch building for weeks, just listening to them hammer out the theoreticals of it all - the same itch that once sent him into the woods after a dead body, that’s gotten him in trouble more times than he can count, that’s always told him to poke at something until it pokes back.  
  
It’s an accident in that he didn’t expect to be so good at it.  
  
\----  
  
He slides the needle into his arm and his eyes flutter shut as the Somnacin takes hold, dimming his view of the cluttered laboratory at George Washington University, the empty take-out boxes and ink-covered whiteboards.  
  
He wakes up in Beacon Hills.  
  
“Holy fucking shit balls,” he whispers to himself, spinning jerkily in a full circle in the middle of the forest. He’s alone, or appears to be, but he’s in the place he misses most and he knows it like the back of his hand - knows exactly where the path he’s on will lead him, knows where in town he’ll end up if he goes the other way.  
  
He has no idea yet, about tokens and not building from memory. No one does. At first he’s hollering, screaming “Hello!” and “Can anybody hear me?” into the space around him, but his only response is the scolding of a nearby squirrel and the squawk of a bird taking flight. When that gets old, he spends what feels like ages wandering around the woods of the place that he misses most, running his hands along the tree bark and snapping off branches to marvel at how real it feels in his hand. The scent of the pine needles is exactly as he remembered it and he holds out his arm to admire the way the sunlight trickles through the canopy to play over his fingers.  
  
“Scott, buddy,” he says to the woods at large, ‘cause it feels like Scott could come wandering around from behind that sycamore at any moment, “you should see this. This is in my _mind_ , I am creating it with my mind, I am basically God right now. Jesus, Scott, this is so freaking awesome.”  
  
“ _What the hell do you think you’re doing_?”  
  
Stiles startles and drops the branch he’s been holding. Cobb’s entrance into his dream is about as smooth as anything else he does, which is to say not very - he comes stomping through the trees like an avenging vision of tweed, squinting furiously and jabbing his finger in Stiles’ direction.  
  
“Do you have any idea what could go wrong here? No, wait, I’ll answer that, _you don’t_ , because _no one does_ , god fucking dammit you could’ve dropped into a coma, you could’ve OD’d on the fucking Somnacin, you could have died and we don’t even know what would’ve happened to you then, this is so fucking irresponsible of you-”  
  
Stiles jumps back, startled, heart pounding as the consequences of what he’s just done catch up to him (he’ll be fired, he’ll be expelled, he’ll be thrown in jail for misappropriation of university equipment, oh god Miles will _look_ at him) and he becomes aware of a sound in the distance.  
  
He’s heard about this, listening in to Miles and Cobb's chatter. This fuzzy concept of the “subconcious,” your mind’s immune system, registering a foreign presence and trying to protect you from it. He’s heard it usually takes the form of jackbooted thugs, guys with guns, hostile civilians.  
  
But there’s no mistaking that sound. Turns out, when Stiles’ mental white blood cells form, they take the shape of _wolves_.  
  
Cobb hears the howling rising on the wind and just says “Jesus fuck,” but the timer runs out before he can get up close and personal with whatever’s crashing towards them through the trees.  
  
\----  
  
Cobb and Miles take turns yelling at him after that.  
  
It’s hard to take it seriously because Cobb’s scientific thirst for knowledge trumps his self preservation any day. He keeps forgetting that he’s meant to be scolding Stiles, not quizzing him.  
  
“But how did you get it to _smell_ like a forest? Did you envision the - not the point, sorry,” he breaks off, remembering himself abruptly, “the point is, that was very irresponsible, and you could have been seriously hurt! This is highly experimental technology - god, we shouldn’t even be testing it - and we have literally no idea how Somnacin reacts with different body masses or brain chemistries, it’s a miracle you’re not in a coma right now.”  
  
“I’m not sure how I got it to smell like a forest, actually,” Stiles says, ignoring the rest of it. Cobb’s clearly already spaced out, revisiting his time in the dream and sketching out all the inconsistencies.  
  
“Extraordinary, for a first-time dreamer, the level of detail. There was a house, right where I entered the dream, totally burnt out - is it that way in real life or did it present as dilapidated because you didn’t have the mental bandwidth, so to speak, to turn it into a fully developed - and you should be ashamed of yourself!”  
  
Miles is much more effective.  
  
“Mr. Stilinski, I hope you understand the gravity of your actions,” he says evenly. Stiles is about 85 percent sure that Miles’ interest is piqued just as much as Cobb’s and he’s only pretending to be disappointed, but the other 15 percent is trying to throw itself at Miles’ feet and beg for mercy.    
  
“We placed our faith in you when we invited you to participate in this study and you have betrayed it most grievously," Miles continues, holding up a quelling hand when Cobb tries to interject again. "We may have no choice but to suspend your internship. Certainly we will need to reconsider your access privileges.”   
  
“Yes, sir,” Stiles says, looking straight ahead, misty eyed. Cobb, in the background, fidgets.  
  
“But can you do it again?” he asks.  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I HAVE LITERALLY NO IDEA WHERE THIS IS GOING. NONE. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHO I WANT TO HOOK UP WITH WHO. I AM SO CONFLICTED.
> 
> but I will say this - first of all, that werewolves are not the only nasties out there, that Stiles and the dream team will be running into them, and that eventually "Arthur" goes home. And at some point (like fifty bazillion words down the road, so it's not weighing on me a whole lot just yet) I will have to make the decision about whether or not he gets together with Eames or Derek and it is literally the hardest choice I have ever had to make AUGH.
> 
>  
> 
> Sorry this chapter is so short, believe me when I say there's more coming. You can find snippets and WIP posts at my tumblr (bravowolf.tumblr.com) under the "parallel lines" tag.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which dreamsharing is explored, and Stiles does some matchmaking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in the market for a beta!! more notes at the bottom of the chapter, let me know if you're down :)

“You’re dreaming? For, like, money?” Stiles can picture the ‘I don’t get it’ face that Scott’s pulling right now in full technicolor, he’s seen it that many times.

“It’s not as sketchy as all that,” Stiles says, switching his phone to his other ear as he gropes in his bag for his keys. “It’s a summer internship working with this experimental technology and these really crazy smart professors. It’s super cool, dude, you’d love it.”

“If you say so,” Scott says, sounding doubtful at best.

“Seriously, if you come out here I can maybe show you or something,” Stiles says. “You can literally build anything you want. The first time I did it was pretty much an accident and I still managed to build the whole reserve, down to the pine trees and Derek’s old place.”

“An accident?” Scott’s suspicious now — one side effect of having grown up getting into mischief with Stiles is that he knows exactly what Stiles sounds like when he’s trying to downplay having done something phenomenally stupid. “What, did you trip and fall into some ‘experimental technology’?”

“I may or may not have had actual permission to use it?” Stiles tries.

“Dude, just — promise me you’ll be careful?” Stiles can _hear_ the puppy dog eyes at this stage, which would be more irritating if he didn’t know that Scott is desperately unhappy about being unable to back Stiles up if anything goes wrong. They haven’t been apart for this long since they were eight years old and the separation is killer.

He sighs. “I promise. Professor-sanctioned experimenting only from here on out.”

“Didn’t you say this guy knows Deaton?”

“Yeah, I think I heard that his wife used to work with animals or something like that, so they probably ran in the same creepy omnipotent veterinarian circles. Pretty sure that’s how I got the job. Wasn’t because I have a ton of experience in dreamsharing, that’s for sure.”

Scott hums in agreement. “D’you think Deaton will get me a cool job too?”

“Dude, can’t hurt to ask,” Stiles says with a shrug. “How’re things back home? How’s Allison?” Privately he’s impressed that Scott has gone this long without bringing her up — a sign of growing maturity?

“It’s good. Quiet. Haven’t heard anything out of the Alpha pack lately, but Derek’s still keeping us on our toes with training and everything,” Scott says. “Allison and I are — it’s good, man, I don’t know, more mellow, more normal. Nobody’s tried to kill either one of us on a date night in a long time and we’re kind of enjoying it while we can.”

“If ‘We’re not in danger of suddenly dying’ is a high point in your relationship, you might need to re-evaluate things” Stiles tells him frankly.

“Are you kidding? It’s like the high point of the last four years. Derek’s super twitchy because he thinks it’s too good to be true and we’re going to all get eaten by a rogue caterpillar or something when we least expect it.”

“A were-caterpillar?” Stiles asks. “Do they have those? I bet they have those.”

“If they do, Derek’s keeping quiet about it,” Scott says, like he’s just now considering the possibility. “We have a lot of movie nights and stuff these days, mostly ‘cause Lydia made an executive decision that we needed to bond and Isaac’s never seen the _Matrix_. I think it makes Derek feel better when he can glower at all of us at once.”

Stiles laughs, ignoring the _wish I was there_ pang that hits him just under the ribs. “Alright, buddy, I gotta go sleep. Tell everyone I said hi, okay?”

“Alright, dude, be safe. Miss you,” Scott adds as an afterthought, which means _I love you bro_.

“Of course you do, dude, I’m awesome,” Stiles says, by which he means _I love you too_ and maybe, just maybe, _don’t get eaten by a caterpillar_.

\----

A month after Stiles starts dreaming in earnest, the project abruptly acquires another collaborator. Miles’ daughter comes waltzing into the lab like she owns the place, dropping a dry kiss on her father’s cheek and launching into a withering critique of the Somnacin variation that Cobb’s fussing over (one meant to make the dreams last longer, but reduce the likelihood of Stiles puking up his guts for an hour after he comes out).

“She could disrupt our whole research model,” Cobb complains to Stiles during Mal’s third visit in as many days, after soundly losing an argument about whether or not he was titrating a solution correctly. The argument is made worse by her insistence in calling him Dominique with what Stiles is sure is a deliberately thick accent.

Mal is prattling to her father in rapid-fire French on the other side of the lab as she gestures furiously with her hands — from the looks of things, her apartment hunting is not going very well.

“Maybe,” Stiles whispers back, “or _maybe_ we could use her. Chemistry isn’t exactly your strong point, you know.” Cobb’s sullen silence isn’t particularly encouraging. What is encouraging is the fact that Stiles is undeniably right, and also Miles is the boss — Mal joins their team almost by accident, like she can’t bear to stop correcting their mistakes long enough to leave.

Stiles is half in love with her by the end of the first week, despite her withering disdain for plaid. He’s always had a thing for strong, fiercely intelligent women who were entirely out of his league.

It takes Cobb a little longer to catch on.

\----

Mal’s first love is chemistry, followed closely by couture, followed closely by making lesser men (read: everybody) quake in their boots. She seems to think it a pity that the substances she handles force her to cover up every day in drab lab coats, gloves and goggles, so she compensates by looking painstakingly fashionable the rest of the time.

Stiles is so awestruck he can barely say two words to her. Lord knows how long he would’ve gone on as a tongue-tied lab partner if she didn’t take it upon herself to break the silence, one long afternoon when they’re waiting for Cobb and Miles to get back from some graduate program fundraiser.

“We are so lucky,” she says, grinning at him across the table. She’s meant to be catching up on their notes so far and Stiles is meant to be designing in-dream experiments; both have, by silent and mutual agreement, declared these things a waste of time.

“Why, ‘cause we don’t have to schmooze?” Stiles asks.

“No, Stiles, because we are here at all! It is amazing,” she confides, “being able to build our hearts’ desires with such control, such lucidity, don’t you think? The first time my father showed me what he was working on, I was utterly blown away — I knew I had to be a part of it somehow, and now, here we are.”

“What was the dream?” Stiles asks. “The one he showed you?” Mal smiles, starry eyed with remembrance.

“My father took me to Paris as he first knew it, the summer he met my mother. It was stunning. It wasn’t even a fraction of what we can do now that we’ve come so far, but I shall never forget it.” She laughs and leans toward him across the desk. “Where was yours? Dominique said you went blundering in with no training, you _enfant terrible_.”

“Home,” Stiles says after a moment’s pause. “I dreamed myself home.”

He doesn’t doubt that he made the right decision in leaving, he doesn’t, but even now it’ll still choke him up and set his brain spinning, at odd moments. God, what if something happens to them while he’s on the other side of the country playing make believe? Derek couldn’t research his way out of a paper bag if his life depended on it, which it sometimes does, and what if he and Scott start bickering again, or Allison’s crazy second cousin twice removed comes to town with a bazooka, or his dad decides to replace the whole food pyramid with curly fries, or, or, or -

Mal is watching him with eyes that are too perceptive by far. “You must miss it very much,” she says only.

“Yeah, well,” Stiles says with a grin, desperate to change the mood and get his mind off its downward spiral, “it’s no Paris, that’s for sure. Hardly any boutiques. Lots of lacrosse. You’d be bored to tears in about five seconds.”

“Tell me more,” Mal says. And she listens.

She’s an awfully good listener; she laughs when he tells her about Scott’s dumb-blonde moments, gasps in all the right places and doesn’t call him out on the parts where he’s obviously and awkwardly glossing over something (usually something with sharp teeth). When Cobb comes strolling through the door an hour later, glowing with victory and fresh grants, Stiles has not only talked himself out of a panic attack but out of most of his fear of Mal as well.

She doesn’t intimidate him nearly as much after that, even though he learns to keep an eye out for the signs that Mal’s work is not going well. She has a way of projecting.

“Your shirts are horrible,” she says out of the blue one day while Stiles is deeply absorbed in choosing his courses for the upcoming semester. She’s meant to be figuring out the composition of a Somnacin sample designed by another lab, and if Stiles had been paying any kind of attention he would have noticed that she had dumped three beakers in a row down the sink and stripped off her gloves — clear danger signs, all.

“What?” Stiles jerks his head up, startled.

“Is it that cold in here? Do you honestly need twelve of them at once?”

“I — not really? What’s wrong with my shirts?”

“You have about six of them on and they all clash with one another, _chéri_ , it is absolutely _criminal_.”

“My shirts are fine,” Stiles says defensively, glancing down.

“Come along,” Mal says. She sheds her lab coat and grabs her purse in one fluid motion, tugging him to his feet with one hand under his arm. “I simply cannot look at you or this room or that _putain de_ redox sensor for one minute longer. We are going shopping.”

“But I—”

“And _leave_ that horrendous jacket,” she snaps impatiently as he makes an abortive grab for his belongings. His eyes meet Cobb’s when she’s pulling him out the door and he clutches the frame with the last shreds of his willpower.

“ _Help me_ ,” he whispers furiously. Cobb merely shakes his head in sympathy (“Better you than me,” Stiles reads in his averted gaze) and Stiles resigns himself to an early, but fashionable, grave.

\----

They figure it out, inch by inch. The first thing they determine is that no, really, dreams do require some degree of research - Cobb tries a safari-themed dreamscape, but the fact that he has no idea how a giraffe moves and his idea of hyenas is based exclusively on Disney movies quickly becomes evident.

“Oh god, what is that thing?” Stiles asks with equal parts horror and fascination, while Mal peers curiously over his shoulder.

“Dominique, is that — I think it’s meant to be a — how do you say, _hippopotame_?”

“I think you got it confused with a water buffalo halfway through.”

“I only really remember the top parts that poke up above the water, okay?” Cobb says defensively. “Ears and eyes and not much else. I guess my mind just — made up the rest of it. Or something.”

“Does it look angry to anybody else?” Stiles says. The creature snorts and paws at the ground.

“Drive away, Dominique, _drive away_.”

Apparently, even though he couldn’t seem to recall what they looked like, Cobb had read somewhere that hippos were one of the most dangerous and aggressive animals in Africa and internalized this fact. The result is a hippo car chase over a mile of Cobb’s imagined Serengeti, with an unrealistically speedy hippo-buffalo hybrid roaring in the background and Mal and Stiles clinging for dear life to the support bars of the jeep (“Why, Cobb, why could you not imagine _seatbelts_ ,” Stiles wails in anguish as they catch air going over a pothole. Mal is laughing too hard to be of any help).

They make it out alive, and Mal forces Cobb to spend a week researching Sub-Saharan zoology, animal movement, and (most critically, in her opinion) hippo behavior. Cobb complains that he now knows way more than he ever needed to know about hippo territory marking but when they go back under, everything’s shaped the way it’s supposed to be and nothing comes charging at them out of the brush.

“So things don’t need to be exact,” Stiles says, observing the way the giraffe still has an odd hitch in its gait, “because you sort of accept most of the weird inconsistencies in a dream.”

“But you still need to do your homework,” Mal says with a pointed stare at Cobb. Cobb is way too excited about this most recent development to notice, however — he’s watching with delighted fixation as a zebra herd crosses in front of them, snorting and stomping their hooves at the sight of an unfamiliar vehicle.

Stiles has dreamed them into his own jeep this time, just to be sure. And declared himself driver. Better safe than sorry.

\----

In the middle of all this discovery, summer ends and college starts for real (“Don’t be stupid,” Mal says shortly when Stiles starts asking pointed questions about the duration of his technically-temporary internship, “you’re not going anywhere”). Stiles has to cut back on his hours in the dream lab in order to take classes like a normal freshman.

Thank god he has Mal to help him with his chem classes, and Miles to nudge him gently towards the more worthwhile faculty members. Cobb offers him free tutoring in any of his GE subjects (except chemistry, which he has finally — if not very gracefully — ceded to Mal).

The end result is that Stiles spends less time under and more time in an observing role, which basically means he sits in a room and does his homework while Dom and Mal sleep. It’s mind numbingly-dull compared to what he was doing over the summer but it’s not like he has waking hours to spare.

Still, at least he has (conscious) company in the form of Miles, who has been playing supervisor ever since Stiles joined the team. Miles isn’t terribly fond of dreaming itself, for all that the academics and ethics of it fascinate him endlessly (one too many pre-Mal Somnacin compounds, Stiles expects) and instead prefers to keep tabs on their bodies in the physical world.

“You should try coming under again some time,” Stiles tells him one day, when he’s watching heart rate monitors as Cobb and Mal run laps in the dream. “It’s amazing, the things we can do now. We hardly ever get sick anymore.”

“I’m an old man, Mr. Stilinski,” Miles says as strokes the hair off a still-sleeping Mal’s forehead. “I doubt you’ll understand this, but I prefer to keep both feet firmly in reality. Dreams get too appealing after a certain age.”

He’s right, Stiles doesn’t really get it, but he respects the professor’s decision enough to not voice the questions on his mind - things like _But why would you stay here when you could build castles in there_ , and _What are you afraid of_? Instead he just nods, and smiles, and goes to check Cobb’s blood pressure.

\----

Stiles loves sitting with Mal in her lab, watching her murmur to herself in a low and constant stream of French as she fiddles with compounds. She seems tolerant of his presence at first, then gradually incorporates him into her mumblings.

“ _Non, non, j’en ai marre de ces - chéri, donne-moi la cétone là-bas_?

Stiles has spent enough time with her to know that “ _chéri_ ” is usually him, but he took Spanish in high school and the only thing he can do with that is order a burrito.

“ _Qu’est-ce que tu as aujourd’hui? T’es sourd ou quoi? J’ai besoin_ \- oh.”

He can see the moment her brain catches up to her mouth. She starts laughing. “I am sorry, _chéri_ , I take it all back. Will you hand me the _cétone_ there, in that blue bottle? _Merci_.”

That’s how lab time turns into lesson time. Mal quizzes him while she titrates Somnacin blends, balances equations, and gives mice what must be extremely lucid dreams of cheese.

“ _Je_?” she calls over her shoulder, scribbling on a whiteboard.

“ _Suis_.” Stiles is comfortably wedged in a corner, sorting out notes from his art history class in preparation for the epic midterm-cramming session he’s got coming up.

“ _Tu_?”

“ _Es_.”

“ _Très bien, chéri,_ ” she tells him when he makes it through the whole present-tense conjugation of être without stumbling, “ _tu vas bientôt parler le francais couramment si tu continues comme-ça — peut-etre tu peux m’aider à enseigner Monsier Cobb, no_?” 

Stiles only catches about every third word of that but it’s enough to have him beaming at her over his textbooks.

\----

Stiles is the one who figures out about totems, when he spends the day under on his own constructing their lecture hall piece by piece. It’s meant to be a study in details, figuring out how real you can get the dream when you’re not painting with broad strokes and letting someone else fill in the gaps. Unfortunately, opening his eyes at the end is not the revelation that it usually is.

“Mr. Stilinski?” Miles asks him, coming over and putting a hand on his shoulder. Stiles blinks twice to try and shake off the sudden sensation of vertigo. “Are you quite alright?”

“I just - is it over?”

Miles frowns at him. “Is what over, Mr. Stilinski?”

“Am I awake? Is this the real one?”

“It is indeed,” Miles tells him with no small amount of concern in his voice. “Dom! Do come see to your intern, his experiment appears to have been a tad too successful.”

Stiles is preoccupied, studying the piles of notes on Miles’ desk and trying to remember if he’d constructed that ugly-ass paperweight, some kind of mini replica of a Tibetan fertility statue, into the dream. He decides that no, he didn’t, that he was far too intent on filling in the bookshelves to focus on the quirks of Miles’ workspace.

Miles called for Dom but Mal is the one who shows up first, frowning and placing a gentle, testing hand on his forehead. Like his problem is a fever and not a sudden inability to tell what’s real and what’s not.

Stiles allows himself a moment, no longer, to shut his eyes and lean into her touch. Then he swings his legs off the chair.

“We need a way to tell,” he says to her. “We need a way to know, for sure, which one is reality.”

“You’re awake now, _chéri_ ,” Mal says carefully. “This is real, you know that, right?”

“Yeah, thanks, I figured that out, but a goddamn projection could tell me the same thing.” Stiles is shaky and snappish, and he knows it, and the look that Mal levels him states clearly that she’s only letting his rudeness slide because she can see the tremors in his hands. Dom approaches to stand behind her, squinting at Stiles with concern. “We need a way to know.”

It takes them only a couple days to latch on to the idea of totems. They discard a dozen other options before Cobb notices that his grandfather’s watch (which stopped a month ago when Cobb dropped a book on it) is still ticking merrily away in dream time. He’d kept wearing it out of habit, and when it showed up in the dreams he hadn’t even thought to question it. From there it’s easy enough for each of them to find something small and personal to carry with them in the waking world.

“Still,” Mal says, once they’ve hammered it out - Stiles with his die, Mal with her top, Cobb with his pocketwatch and Miles with his wedding ring, “this seems a little silly.”

“Hm?” Stiles says, half asleep. They’re all three lying on top of a grassy knoll in the middle of a meadow, with wildflowers blooming in all directions. The sun is warm, the space around them is a pointillist painting of purple, orange and yellow, and Stiles is running his fingers over the die in his pocket like a promise.

“Our dreams are so fantastical,” she says, lifting her hand and willing a dandelion into it as a demonstration. She lets it hang for a moment before imagining a breeze to ruffle Stiles’ hair and break the flower head into a hundred pieces. “We can do anything here. We could build mountains. The power here, the potential — it’s incredible, can’t you feel it? How could anyone mistake this for reality?”

“I don’t know,” Stiles says. “What if someone tricked you? Put you in a dream without you knowing, and you just didn’t think to question it? Might take you a long time to notice.”

Cobb sits up on his elbows. “But why would anybody want to do that?”

“Beats me,” Stiles says with a shrug. “Dreams can be pretty personal, though. Maybe as a form of revenge? I can think of a couple people that totally deserve the showed-up-to-school-naked nightmare.” _Jackson_ , his brain supplies helpfully, _has one of those coming to him like a fucking karmic freight train, only no, wait, he’d probably love that. Shit_.

“I’m glad we have these, at any rate,” Dom says. “Better safe than sorry.” He’s the one responsible for their mini-vacation today as a reward for a their hard work: the meadow and the flowers, the mountains rising on the horizon and the diamond sparkle of a lake in the distance, fed by a stream that curls around their hillside with a happy murmur. He’s come a long way since his first drab forays into world building.

“Dom,” Mal says, turning to smile at him in the sunshine, “this is a beautiful dream.”

Stiles can feel the Somnacin wearing off, but just before he wakes up he catches a glimpse of the soft look on Cobb’s face. _Uh oh_ , he thinks, _we’re in trouble now_.

\----

When signing up for classes, Stiles had picked art history out of a hat. He’s surprised by how much he loves it. 

He loves the way that movements in art tie into the politics and history of the eras in which they were born, and then reflect themselves in things like architecture and advertising. He loves the way that these people were all unequivocally batshit _crazy_ and all the petty infighting that happens when you give batshit crazy people a lot of money and a massive building to make. He also loves the art; the way he learns to look at everything with a more critical eye, tell the difference between Baroque and Rococo, spot hints of Fauvism or Ashcan in his everyday life, now that he knows what to look for.

Cobb, as an architecture student, is a huge help with this. Normally.

“Do you know if Mal’s seeing anyone?” Cobb asks casually when he’s supposed to be helping Stiles study, while Stiles is frantically trying to memorize a list of Italian Renaissance painters along with their seminal works and frankly has no time for this shit.

“How should I know?” Stiles says, squinting at a — is that a Masaccio?

“You guys spend a lot of time together, is all, I thought maybe she might have mentioned someone.”

“Nope. Not to me,” Stiles says, which is mostly true (She does mention men but only after the fact, in the “Well he was cute, but I have never met anyone so paralyzingly dull in my life, and he didn’t even know who Catherine Deneuve was, can you imagine? At least the sex was decent,” way).

He squints at the flashcard. Definitely not Masaccio. Shit.

“Interesting,” Cobb says.

\---

They figure out about dying in dreams because Mal decides she wants to fly and because Cobb has a sudden inability to deny Mal anything.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Stiles asks, looking over the edge of the hot air balloon with no small amount of trepidation.

“Why wouldn’t it?” Mal asks snippily. “I don’t know if you were paying attention, but I reconstructed the Hanging Gardens of Babylon last week. This hardly seems more improbable.”

“Worst case scenario,” Cobb says, trying to be supportive, “you can always re-imagine the ground as a giant trampoline on your way down.”

“No, yeah, you’re totally right.” Stiles can hear his voice cracking, damn it, as Mal clambers onto the side of the basket and ducks her head to avoid the burner. “This seems super legit.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work, and Mal apparently passes out mid-fall — she hits the ground like a battering ram, and before Stiles can start screaming the dream shatters like glass around them, launching them all into the waking world with a jolt.

Miles is already there, wrapping his arm around Mal’s shoulders and rocking her gently as she shakes — Stiles suspects the only reason she’s not crying outright is that she’s still in shock. She’s got a white-knuckled death grip on the arms of her chair and has yet to pull out the Somnacin IV.

The first thing Stiles does is roll his die.

“Mal?” Cobb says, standing like he wants to go to her but not sure if he’d be welcome. “Are you alright?”

“We woke up,” she says.

“What?”

“We woke up. From the dream,” she says, speaking as clearly as she can through the chattering in her teeth. “When I died we woke up.”

“You were the dreamer,” Stiles says slowly. “So when you weren’t there to dream it anymore the whole thing kind of — collapsed. It makes sense.”

“The important thing is that you’re alright,” Cobb says.

“When you die, you wake up,” she repeats. “But why didn’t it work?”

“You’re done for the day,” Miles says abruptly. “Take the weekend off. I don’t want to see you again until Monday and that includes you, Mr. Stilinski, don’t think I don’t notice when our reference texts are mysteriously alphabetized during off hours. Out, both of you.”

Cobb casts one last lingering look at Mal, who has more or less pulled herself together (but still not shrugged out from under her father’s protective arm), then grabs his coat and Stiles’ wrist and pulls him out the door.

\---

“What about other labs?” Stiles asks out of the blue one day, about a week after the flying fiasco. Mal has been pouting non-stop since Cobb and Miles told her that she couldn’t try again; after cursing them out in an inventive combination of French and English, she declared that she was going shopping and swept out the door in a huff. Cobb went running after her when he found that she’d swiped his credit card.

So it’s just Stiles and the professor, who’s now considering him over the tops of his spectacles (on anyone else, they’d be glasses, but on Miles, by god they’re spectacles).

“What about them, Mr. Stilinski?”

“I mean, we can’t be the only ones with this technology. Other labs in the country, in the world — aren’t they studying this stuff? One of them had to have accidentally died in a dream before we did, but we’re figuring all this crap out out the hard way.”

“You’re right, there are other labs,” Miles says, “and no doubt many of their denizens have perished in dreams before. But this is a very new field. New enough that the slightest edge over your competitor could be the difference between unimaginable riches and being a footnote in history - it’s only logical to guard your findings with the utmost care.”

“So no one’s sharing, is what you’re saying.”

“Unfortunately.”

“What are people going to use this stuff for, anyway? We’re just working out the mechanics of it right now, but I can’t help but think down the road a bit. I guess it has a commercial use in terms of, like, wish fulfillment or maybe therapy or something, but the possibility for misuse is huge. Regulating it is going to be a bitch. What do you think?”

“That, Mr. Stilinski, would be where I come in. What do you think I’m doing while you are off gallivanting through each other’s heads? I’ve done a fair bit of dreaming myself, before you came along, and now I have you three to continue my research for me; the result of these pages and pages of notes is going to one day be policy recommendations, ethics, rules,” Miles says, gesturing the the stack of paper that surround them. “My hope is that by planting myself here, at the genesis of this field, I will be able to head off some of that ‘misuse’ you mentioned at the pass.”

“That’s... pretty optimistic of you,” Stiles says honestly.

“Pessimism has never struck me as particularly productive. Still,” Miles adds at length, with a minute quirk in the corner of his mouth that means he is feeling fond, “as long as I have young dreamers such as yourself to pin my hopes on, that optimism does not seem entirely unfounded.”

It’s probably the nicest thing Miles has ever said to him. Stiles stares at him for a beat to make sure he didn’t imagine it and then buries himself in his textbook in an effort to avoid unmanly blubbering.

\----

The next four days or so are an exercise in patience, in which Cobb tries to work up the courage to ask Mal out and Stiles tells him to sack up and do it, Mal already thinks his dreams are pretty so he’s guaranteed at least a first date. They have countless versions of this conversation before Stiles snaps.

“Dom,” he says, because it is hard to call a man “Cobb” and see him as your sort-of boss after being privy to this much hand-wringing, “if you do not ask her out in the next three hours, I am either going to lock you two in a room together indefinitely or tell Miles about your intentions towards his daughter. Your pick.”

Dom goes white. Stiles is like 80 percent sure that Miles is already fully aware of Dom’s interest (seriously, the man knows everything) but clearly that thought hasn’t occurred to Dom yet.

“You’re a bad person,” Dom says, nervously clicking a pen in his hands as he rises to his feet. Stiles takes it as a positive sign that he’s heading towards the hallway, and Mal’s lab, no matter that he looks like he’s going to an execution.

“I know. It keeps me up at night. You’ll thank me later,” he yells at Dom’s back, smirking as the door slams shut behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:  
> No, no, I have had enough of this — darling, hand me the ketone over there?
> 
> What is the matter with you today? Are you deaf? I need the — oh.
> 
> Very good, darling, you’ll be speaking French fluently in no time if you continue like this — maybe you can help me teach Mr. Cobb?
> 
> * Having personally studied a bit of art history, I am aware that Stiles would probably not be studying Ashcan and Renaissance and Fauvism in one freshman-level class, no matter how exhaustive. At least not in the detail I have him going into. But! I need him to get good at art history quickly, including the architecture side of things, so he’s going to have to suck it up and do some very speedy learning. ...Sorry bro.
> 
> ** Also, I thought for some reason that Mal's mother had died. I discovered later that this wasn't the case but it would mess some stuff up if I went back and changed that assumption, and I am first and foremost very lazy. So in the name of poetic license, Mal's mother passed away some time ago, and if you really need a former Mrs. Miles for the movie then you can pretend that Miles remarries and divorces later.
> 
> ATTENTION: I am officially in the market for a beta! Please let me know if you're interested - I mostly just need a sounding board, because I write about 200% more things than I ultimately include in the chapter but I just end up discarding them as irrelevant to the story or out of character. so having someone be like "yeah no that makes sense" or "why would you even write that get rid of it immediately" would change my world. Thanks ever so :)


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